🇺🇸 “Never Bet Against America: The U.S. Is Overpowered,” by Tomas Pueyo. On his Substack, Uncharted Territories, Pueyo lays out a number of points (with maps and charts) showing why the United States holds geographic supremacy in global affairs, despite its often maladjusted politics. Takeaways include:
The U.S. has:
Some of the best farmland in the world
The best naturally navigable waterways in the world
Amazing natural ports
All of these connect US regions to each other, uniting them politically
It also has some of the best oil and gas resources to fuel its economy
And it has several layers of defense to protect all this wealth, starting with the two largest oceans, one on each side
After the oceans, it has two insurmountable mountain barriers that further defend its heartland
Its neighbor to the north is sparsely populated because it’s too cold and infertile
Its neighbor to the south is weaker and separated by a narrow mountainous desert
The US has managed to extend its model to countries across the world, creating buffers that repel all the other natural superpowers, Russia, China, and India.
In a world that sees China climbing, and witnesses how the US shoots itself in the foot with stupid policies like tariffs, it’s easy to fear the US might be set aside as a have-been. But its geography makes it impossible: It will always be rich, and it will be impossible to physically threaten.
I would personally never bet against the U.S.
📵 “Doomscroll Detox: 6 Steps to Take Back Your Sanity," by Builders. Log on to social media these days and your experience is a crapshoot: you might mostly see content from friends and family with cute animal videos or sports highlights mixed in—or you might see the worst of humanity. As mobile devices have become a part of daily life for most Americans, the likelihood that we come into contact with the latter has grown significantly, and it's not hard to see how this can take a heavy mental toll on us, making us angrier, more stressed, and even depressed.
While quitting social media cold turkey is rarely feasible for many people, there are habits we can all adopt to mitigate its worst excesses and tend to our sanity, which the Builders Movement outlines in a recent piece. These include intentionally following rational thinkers, ditching memes for stories, and shifting our focus back to the local. Check out the full story for more ideas!
✍🏻 “Cynthia Ozick: A New York Jewish Life of Letters,” by Tunku Varadarajan. In the Wall Street Journal, Varadarajan interviews the 97-year-old novelist and essayist about World War II, Zohran Mamdani, the resurgence of antisemitism, and the shortcomings of William Shakespeare. The piece includes an interesting slice of American historical and personal life:
Ms. Ozick also recalls “the Irish kids who came out in the streets to beat up the Jewish kids as they were coming out of Hebrew school.” She describes this as if it were a rite of passage, and adds that the same Irish boys, “as well as the Italian kids,” went on to become “the spine of the best American citizenry.” In telling me this, Ms. Ozick offers another childhood recollection.
“My brother, who was six years older than me, was beat up by Billy Hayes, an Irish kid who lived down the block.” Ms. Ozick’s brother came home crying to their mother. The Bronx, she says, was “semirural then. It was the Depression. Empty lots everywhere. There were snakes—literally—in the grass. And my mother picked up a stick from one of these lots, pressed it into my brother’s hand, and took him away to take care of Billy Hayes.” Ms. Ozick quips that her mother was “proto-Zionist.”
There’s more to the story. Years later, in 1947, she was at New York University, a 19-year-old studying for her bachelor’s degree. “It was the time of the GI Bill, and the place was flooded with old men—28, 29, 32, or more, many already married, living in Quonset huts in Long Island.” This was “a different NYU, much less fancy, much less prestigious.”
One day, as she was sitting in the cafeteria, “this guy, still in his uniform, as so many of them were, comes up to me and says, ‘Are you Cynthia from the drugstore?’ ”He had recognized her, and he said he was William Hayes from Pelham Bay. “He told me that he had opened up”—liberated—“one of the concentration camps while serving in Europe and that he would never be the same again.”
This experience had clearly “made a difference in his life,” so she didn’t ask: “Hey, are you the same Billy Hayes who beat up my brother?” But she knew he was. Ms. Ozick pauses to make sense of it all, before saying, “I think it was a tremendous emblem of the continuation of the meaning of this country.”
“This is a good country. It’s a great country. And now, it’s disintegrating.”
🕵️♀️ An Inside Job, by Daniel Silva. The Gabriel Allon series is one of the most enjoyable espionage collections around. Silva fans anxiously await the arrival of a new Allon book each summer and promptly devour it in one sitting. This year, the former head of the Mossad and now semi-retired art restorer and mystery solver is back in action with his pal the Pope for another caper:
Gabriel Allon has been awarded a commission to restore one of the most important paintings in Venice. But when he discovers the body of a mysterious woman floating in the waters of the Venetian Lagoon, he finds himself in a desperate race to recover a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci.
The painting, a portrait of a beautiful young girl, has been gathering dust in a storeroom at the Vatican Museums for more than a century, misattributed and hidden beneath a worthless picture by an unknown artist. Because no one knows that the Leonardo is there, no one notices when it disappears one night during a suspicious power outage. No one but the ruthless mobsters and moneymen behind the theft—and the mysterious woman whom Gabriel found in a watery grave in Venice. A woman without a name. A woman without a face.
The action moves at breakneck speed from the galleries and auction houses of London to an enclave of unimaginable wealth on the French Riveria—and, finally, to a shocking climax in St. Peter’s Square, where the life of a pope hangs in the balance. An elegant and stylish journey through the dark side of the art world and the Vatican’s murky finances, An Inside Job proves once again that Daniel Silva is the reigning master of international intrigue and suspense.
🎸 It’s A Beautiful Place, by Water From Your Eyes. This band is totally weird in all the best ways. A mashup of indie, punk, dance, experimental, and art rock, the new WFYE record is a blast. Nate Amos and Rachel Brown will be on tour starting this month and always put on a rocking and oddball show. Catch ‘em live if you can! Here’s a sharp new track, “Life Signs.”
I have quit a lot of social media or never joined in the first place. I suppose the Substack ecosystem is social media of a sort but it doesn't come with the algorithms designed to make us hate. People are much more prone to disagree civilly though I do see a rising trend of hostility.